One Piece Mansion is not a Capcom game I had any familiarity with whatsoever prior to receiving a surprise copy of it from a YouTube viewer a little while back.

I’ve spent a bit of time with it this evening, and there’s definitely some appeal there. It’s an exceedingly peculiar game, to be sure — and I’m all for exceedingly peculiar games at the best of times.

Thankfully One Piece Mansion backs its exceeding peculiarity up with some solid gameplay and original ideas, making it a worthwhile addition to your PlayStation library. Let’s take a closer look!

One Piece Mansion was developed in-house at Capcom and released for the original PlayStation in 2001. For context, that is the year after the PS2 released, placing it in that peculiar “between-generations” territory where interesting games often go to die.

Probably the most noteworthy name attached to the project is co-director Hideaki Itsuno, who has spent his entire career at Capcom and, over the years, has brought us titles as diverse as Auto Modellista, Dragon’s Dogma, Power Stone, Devil May Cry and Rival Schools. The game design was by Satoshi Kubota, who also worked on Chaos Legion, the Onimusha series and the White Knight Chronicles games.

One Piece Mansion — which has nothing to do with the anime One Piece, I should probably clarify — casts you in the role of a boy named Polpo, who is in charge of the eponymous apartment block. In the game’s story mode, his sister gets kidnapped by a rival landlord, and the only way for Polpo to get her back is to accomplish seven increasingly difficult missions. The game can also be played in an “Endless” mode at three different difficulty levels, which strips out all the narrative context and just lets you play for as long as you feel like — or until you fail.

At heart, One Piece Mansion is a simple management game with somewhat puzzly elements. Viewing the apartment block from a side-on view, you can spend money to build new rooms, move in waiting residents, construct elevators or swap residents between rooms. You can also switch to “Security” mode, which allows you to take direct control of Polpo; from here, he can use the elevators you’ve constructed to reach the various floors of the building and either put out fires or give any troublemakers a stern telling-off.

As you play, a timer bar constantly proceeds onwards; when it reaches the end, a week passes, and this usually means a new prospective tenant will be added to a queue of up to three candidates. When a tenant is waiting, you can spend money to either put them in an existing room or construct a new room for them, and at the start of each new month all the tenants in your building will pay you rent, providing you with more money for additional renovation and management tasks.

That’s about as deep as the financial side of thing goes; instead, your main focus in One Piece Mansion is on managing resident stress levels. Each tenant in the building is a character who has an impact on the rooms surrounding them, either positive or negative. Some, such as the young girl Ai-chan, have a positive impact in all 8 directions surrounding them; others might have a universally negative impact in one or more directions; others still have a combination of positive and negative impacts. For example, a resident with a pet elephant has a negative impact on those living below him, but a positive one on his neighbours.

As time passes, those positive and negative impacts have an effect on the various residents’ stress meters, which appear above their rooms. If stress gets too high, the room explodes and the tenant leaves, not only depriving you of income but also costing you a chunk of cash. If your available cash reserves drop below zero, that’s an immediate Game Over.

As such, the basic gameplay of One Piece Mansion involves attempting to arrange residents in such a way that positive and negative effects cancel each other out as much as possible — or ideally, positive effects outweigh negative ones.

This would be tricky enough by itself, but there’s an additional consideration, too: Polpo’s rival frequently sends troublemakers over to your building to move in and mess things up. Once a troublemaker has moved in, you can’t evict them, demolish their room or swap them with another resident; the only way to get rid of them is to deliberately stress them out so their room explodes.

And thus those “negative” effects you’ve been trying to avoid actually become useful, shifting your gameplay focus from trying to make everybody happy to tactically using the stress-producing characters to drive out undesirables. As such, you’ll need to try and keep the stress-producers happy while ensuring that they’re having a minimal impact on the other residents of the building as much as possible. I’m sure you can see how this can get surprisingly complicated.

The troublemakers also aren’t happy to just sit in their rooms and passively stress people out, either; they’ll often come out and make mischief, including setting fire to things and robbing other residents. When this happens, that’s the time to switch to Security mode, take direct control of Polpo and give them a good whistle-blowing, which will send them back to their rooms. Polpo seemingly doesn’t think to just kick them out for, you know, actual criminal activity.

And that’s about it. The story mode’s seven stages can be beaten pretty quickly, as the objectives are all fairly straightforward: reach a certain amount of cash on hand, build a certain number of rooms or reach a certain number of storeys in height. The long-term appeal here is intended to come from the Endless mode, much like classic “sandbox strategy” games such as Maxis’ original SimCity, Bullfrog’s Theme Park and other such games from the late ’90s and early ’00s.

What the story mode does do quite a nice job of is introduce you to the various resident types gradually. At the outset, you have some fairly simple to use residents, but with each passing stage new ones are introduced that are a little trickier to find optimal placements for. As time goes on, it becomes important to switch residents around to manage their stress as well as moving new tenants in.

From a modern perspective, it’s easy to look at One Piece Mansion’s extremely short Story Mode — which can probably be beaten in less than an hour — and feel like there’s not much to this game. That’s because we’re so used to “objectives” and “missions” being the be-all and end-all of games like this that it’s easy to miss the real attraction here: the completely freeform mode, where you can set your own goals, experiment with different arrangements of residents and simply play until you’re satisfied.

There’s not a lot of depth to the individual mechanics in One Piece Mansion, but honestly that’s sort of nice — and the real star of the game’s design is the way in which things interlock in different ways.

Sometimes you just want to build something without things getting too complicated — and for me, One Piece Mansion strikes just the right balance between providing a touch of challenge and allowing you the freedom to just play. Plus its appealing, cartoony aesthetic and straightforward control scheme make it surprisingly pick-up-and-play, particularly compared to other games of this type.

So yeah. Probably not a game I’d have thought to pick up myself back in the day — or even today, if I’m honest — but one that is testament to how sometimes stepping out of what you perceive to be your “comfort zone” can reward you with very enjoyable, entertaining experiences.

---

More about One Piece Mansion

---

Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.

Did you know you can subscribe to MoeGamer as a newsletter and get new posts delivered right to you? Just pop your email address in below and subscribe for free. Your address will not be used for anything else.

---